History has shown on numerous occasions that the easiest way to get a number one movie on Netflix is to drop several recognisable stars into a high-concept blockbuster, sit back, and let the viewership data roll in.
True to form, then, the streaming service has a brand new top dog this week, with Jennifer Lopez’s sci-fi actioner Atlas scoring a huge debut. Co-starring Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings breakout Simu Liu, recent Academy Award nominee Sterling K. Brown, and Mr. Reliable himself Mark Strong, the story of an analyst thwarting a rogue AI notched over 56million hours watched during its first frame.
Animation continues to be one of Netflix’s most reliably popular performers, too, with the second and third spots on the weekly top ten going to in-house production Thelma the Unicorn and Blue Sky Studios sequel Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which accrued 17.4million and 15.1million hours respectively.
In fact, 40% of the rankings is comprised of animated family fare, with Ice Age‘s franchise bedfellow Collision Course in seventh position just behind Sing 2, making it patently clear that regardless of which studio or production company it hails from, any splashy adventure featuring anthropomorphised animals is a guaranteed winner.
Former number one hit Mother of the Bride has slipped all the way down to fourth as a result, just ahead of Shia LaBeouf’s Disturbia, which is very much inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, albeit not to a litigious extent after director D.J. Caruso’s homebound thriller survived two separate lawsuits claiming that it was.
In a delicious twist of irony, Paul Feig’s darkly comic thriller A Simple Favour starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively has debuted on Netflix’s top ten in ninth place, with subscribers no doubt encouraged to check it out by the sequel entering production in April 2024, even if the follow-up will stream exclusively on rival platform Prime Video.
For unexplainable reasons, the dismal Madame Web continues to hang around as viewers strive to find out what happened to the mother of Dakota Johnson’s title character when she was researching spiders in the Amazon right before she died, with the list being rounded out by the Antonio Banderas-fronted B-tier thriller Security, which could very generously be described as ‘Die Hard in a mall’.
Once again, it’s another eclectic mix of originals, legacy titles, live-action, animation, sequels, and utter dreck, with Atlas miles ahead of the competition.
The 10 most popular films on Netflix this week:
- Atlas
- Thelma the Unicorn
- Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
- Mother of the Bride
- Disturbia
- Sing 2
- Ice Age: Collision Course
- A Simple Favour
- Madame Web
- Security
